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othing captures the spirit of the American West like desert sunsets, geological wonders and Old West gunfights. Saddle up for a memorable trek through the Sonoran Desert as the Mentor Series discovers the vast beauty and intricate curiosities of Tucson, Arizona. From panoramic, sun-drenched horizons to hidden locations the sun has never reached, you’ll discover the true extremes of light and dark. We’ll head to Gates Pass, revered by professional photographers worldwide. It offers a vantage point unmatched for dazzling images of the setting sun. If you’ve ever had a “sunset screensaver,” it’s likely that the images featuring dark silhouettes of cacti against a brilliant orange and yellow sky were taken at Gates Pass. We’ll help you capture amazing shots of the tranquil sunlight reflected off of the desert hills, the constantly shifting clouds on the horizon, and the glowing, backlit needles of the saguaro cactus. We’ll start the next day at the Sonora Desert Museum. This worldrenowned zoo, natural history museum and botanical garden will bring your lens within inches of more than 1,200 types of plants and more than 300 desert animals, 20 of which are endangered. You’ll capture desert life of all shapes, sizes and colors—from the imposing American Black Bear to the delicate leaf-cutter ant, from a hillside of wildflowers to a red rock canyon. In addition, the museum possesses an extensive gem, mineral and fossil collection—and the only significant dinosaur skeleton ever found in southern Arizona.

Next we’ll crank the way-back machine and give you a glimpse of the Old West through the lens of the film industry. At the base of the Tucson Mountains lies the Old Tucson Studios, where such classics as “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,” “3:10 to Yuma,” and “The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold” were filmed. Now restored, the same sets and streets where such legends as John Wayne and Clint Eastwood faced off with bad guys is a piece of living history. A live cast of character, complete with brilliantly colored costumes, will recreate stunts and shootouts that will challenge your shutter speed and your reaction times. Afterward, we’ll return to Gates Pass for another opportunity to capture that perfect sunset shot (and perfect replacement photo for your desktop’s background). To conclude our desert journey, we’ll spend our last day at Mission San Xavier del Bac. Completed in 1797, it is one of the finest examples of mission architecture in the U.S. Set against the warm browns of the distant hills, it stands like a white beacon against the desert backdrop. Find the perfect angle to capture the imposing dome and the lofty towers of this graceful blend of Moorish, Byzantine and late-Mexican design as the morning sun graces its pristine facade. No matter what path you ride on, Tucson and the Sonoran Desert offer eye-popping vistas and awesome close-ups. Sign up today and hitch a ride with the experts who will broaden your range by bringing you face-to-face with a slice of America you won’t soon forget.

REGISTER ONLINE AT WWW.MENTORSERIES.COM For more information, call toll-free at 888-676-6468.

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September/October 2009

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portfolio

departments

Pictures That Shocked The World 57

Inside American Photo 4 How French journalist Regis Le Sommier learned about the value of small-town American photojournalism.

Photography has been defined by a number of images that have raised ethical and legal issues concerning fakery, censorship, artistic ownership, and exploitation. Here we examine 16 controversial photos that shaped the medium we know today. On the cover: Images from our portfolio on the world’s most controversial photos

Editor’s Note 8 What is a high-impact photograph? They all are, by definition, and it pays to understand that kind of power. Inside Photography 13 How Farrah changed photography.

Public Eye 14 The icon with extravagant hair, by Vicki Goldberg. New Books 20 A breathtaking new volume combines NASA photography with Norman Mailer’s account of the Apollo 11 mission. Art 26 German photographer Andreas Gefeller focuses on the floor—the entire floor—of a Berlin building.

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TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

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© JOE MCNALLY

© ANDREAS GEFELLER/COURESY HASTED HUNT GALLERY

MACIEJ DAKOWICZ

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35 In Print 28 Antoine Verglas makes model Julie Henderson look sexy by making her feel sexy. And there is his special light, too. Witness 35 How three combat photographers got their start shooting local news at a small newspaper in Ohio.

Editor’s Choice 45 The world’s most stylish cameras, and more. Flickr Creative Showcase 49 Our new feature presents big talents from the world’s biggest photo community. In this issue: Maciej Dakowicz of Cardiff, Wales.

Subscriptions American Photo (ISSN 1046-8986) (USPS 526-930) is published bi-monthly (Jan/Feb, Mar/Apr, May/June, July/Aug, Sept/Oct, Nov/Dec) by Bonnier Corporation, 2 Park Ave., New York, NY 10016. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY 10001 and at additional mailing offices. Authorized periodicals postage by the Post Office Department, Ottawa, Canada, and for payment in cash.

The Law 55 New orphan works legislation isn’t necessarily bad for photographers, and it might bring some big benefits. Master Class 77 Andreas Gefeller explains how he creates his ultra-detailed views of the world at our feet, and overhead.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to American Photo, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32164; (800) 274-4514. If the postal services alert us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within one year. One-year subscription rate (6 issues) for U.S. and possessions, $15; Canada (includes 5% GST) and Foreign, $29; cash orders only, payable in U.S. currency. Two years: U.S., $30; Canada and Foreign, $53. Three years: U.S., $45; Canada and Foreign, $76.

Skills 82 Available light isn’t always the right light. Photographer Joe McNally explains how to get rid of it so you can make your own. See It Now 93 New photo exhibitions, from coast to coast, as well as our pick for the month. Publications Mail Agreement Number: 40052054. Canadian Registration Number: 126018209RT0001. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: P.O. Box 503, RPO West Beaver Creek, Richmond Hill ON L4B 4R6 Canada.

Writer Le Sommier (left) and photographer Hondros in Iraq in 2006

Vice President/Editor in Chief Art Director Executive Editor Associate Editor Copy Editor Assistant Art Director Editor at Large

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rench journalist Regis Le Sommier has worked side by side with photojournalists around the globe. Until late last year he was the United States bureau chief for Paris Match, a news magazine that has long championed great photography. In December, Le Sommier returned to Paris to serve as the deputy managing editor for Match, but he recently called us to tell us of a story he thought would be great for American Photo. Back in 2004, while covering the U.S. presidential election campaign in Ohio, he worked with a young photographer named Chris Hondros, and they later teamed up on several other big stories. (In the photo here, you see Le Sommier and Hondros when they were covering the most violent days of the Iraq war in the city of Khadamiyah.) It was around that time

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that Hondros told Regis a remarkable tale—how he and two other prizewinning photojournalists, Tyler Hicks and Spencer Platt, launched their careers at the same small newspaper in Troy, Ohio. As Le Sommier explains on page 35, the three noted photographers learned their most important lessons by covering fires and car accidents in small-town America. He wonders whether these lessons will continue to be passed along, as newspapers face declining readerships and budgets. Nonetheless, Le Sommier notes that the idea of a talented kid emerging from a small newspaper and climbing to the top of the profession represents a particular American notion of destiny. “America is still a place where people believe they can do anything they put their minds to,” he says.

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Editorial contributions should be sent to American Photo, 2 Park Avenue, 10th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Submissions must be accompanied by return postage and will be handled with reasonable care; however, publisher assumes no responsibility for the safety of unsolicited original artwork, photographs, slides, or manuscripts. Customer service: (386) 597-4375; fax (303) 604-7644. Back issues are $8.95 each ($10.95 in Canada; $15.95 other countries) in U.S. funds. Send check or money order to: American Photo Back Issues, P.O. Box 50191, Boulder, CO 80322-0191; (800) 333-8546. For information on reprints and eprints contact Brian Kolb at Wright’s Reprints, (877) 652-5295 or [email protected]. American Photo, September/October 2009, Vol. XX, No. 5. Entire contents © 2009 Bonnier Corporation.

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LONG ISLAND, NY s3EPTn 

EGYPT s3EPTn/CT 

Pack up your camera gear for a weekend on the eastern shores of Long Island with the Mentor Series! Join Nikon professional photographers Reed Hoffmann & Rob Van Petten to experience the abundance of photo opportunities within the quaint villages of the North Fork and along the miles of beautiful, pristine beaches on the South Fork. Get ready for a truly authentic view of this age-old vacationing destination while discovering the locations in a new light with world-class instructors by your side. A visit to a private full-service horse farm provides an exclusive tour and the occasion to photograph the beauty of these gentle animals. Visit charming Sag Harbor, an enchanting town that boasts its strong maritime flavor and holds tight to its history. Experience the magnificent Peconic Estuary System by boat, the quiet beauty of a stunning vineyard, and beach activities which offer the chance to capture recreation and lifestyle shots as the light changes. Get ready to be enchanted by this part of America and wrap up your summer by joining the Mentor Series when we take to Long Island in September!

Get ready for the photographic journey of a lifetime as the Mentor Series heads to Egypt, a land of archaeological and cultural riches. Shoot alongside Nikon professional photographers Mark Alberhasky and Reed Hoffmann while photographing dynamic landscapes, spectacular pyramids and the glorious Nile river. Visit the three Great Pyramids of Giza near Cairo, a glorious backdrop to capture camel drivers and their camels. Want to see the symbol that has represented the essence of Egypt for thousands of years? Nothing can prepare you for seeing the Sphinx the first time, in its massive splendor. The photos you take here are ones you’ll cherish for many years. From the deserts to the Nile, the pyramids to the temples, Egypt’s eyecatching views will stimulate your senses and provide you with fantastic photos. Sign up today for a memorable trek that will bring out the adventurer in you.

REGISTER ONLINE AT WWW.MENTORSERIES.COM For more information, call toll-free at 888-676-6468.

FOR THE PAST 11 YEARS, the Mentor Series program has taken photo enthusiasts to destinations across the country and around the world. With top Nikon professional photographers accompanying participants every day and teaching them how and what to shoot, there’s nothing like a Mentor Series trek. You and your photography will never be the same!

© William Britten

SMOKY MTNS. s/CTn  Grab your camera and join the Mentor Series as we head to the Great Smoky Mountains, a renowned mountain range rising along the Tennessee–North Carolina border. Let our team help you capture these stunning shots as you explore this magnificent National Park in autumn. At 6,643 feet, Clingmans Dome is the highest point in the Great Smoky Mountains national park. The observation tower on the summit offers a remarkable 360° lookout of the Smokies where, on a clear day, the view expands over 100 miles and into seven states, making for a spectacular, unmatched perspective. In contrast, you’ll fill your frame as the sun rises at Cades Cove, a lush valley with preserved homesteads, scenic mountain vistas and an abundant display of wildlife. Journey back to the beautiful Clingmans Dome at sunrise to photograph the dramatic vistas. Everywhere you go in the Great Smoky Mountains, you’ll find exceptional prospects. Don’t miss this opportunity to expand your horizons and your portfolio in the Great Smoky Mountains with expert photographers by your side.

© Chun Han

PHILADELPHIA, PA s/CTn.OV  NEW MASTER CLASS: LIGHTING Philadelphia will provide the perfect backdrop to learn the rewards of using light to create an intentional effect in your photos, as well as explore the history and culture this city has to offer. This trek includes a Master Class on Lighting, providing an exclusive opportunity to determine how luminosity can shape the mood and color of the photographs you create. Visit the stunning Longwood Gardens, one of the world’s premier horticultural display gardens. Travel on to the infamous Eastern State Penitentiary, and explore what lighting is best suited to subject and scene as we shoot models and further practice learned techniques “on location.” Later, photograph along a tour of Philadelphia’s remarkable landmarks from the top of our own doubledecker bus. Everywhere you go in Philadelphia, you’ll find a piece of America’s past and continually discover the chance to utilize the lighting techniques you’ve learned to capture these historic landmarks.

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E D I T O R ’ S

N O T E

HIGH IMPACT WHAT MAKES A PICTURE POWERFUL? W

© BRUCE MCBROOM

hat is high-impact photography? In a general sense, most photography is, by definition. Still images create indelible memories in a way that no other medium can. Words enhance pictures and fill in the information that photos cannot supply. Motion photography’s power comes from its narrative possibilities. But photographs go to the heart of an issue, capture something essential in a face, surprise us with the detail of a scene, and create popular icons that can define an age. In this issue we explore just how still imagery makes its impact. And we start with a beautiful blonde in a red one-piece swimming suit. The blonde, of course, is Farrah Fawcett, who changed the cultural landscape when she posed for photographer Bruce McBroom one afternoon in Los Angeles in 1976. The poster they produced has, as of today, sold over 12 million copies, still a record, though it’s been bootlegged billions of times all over the globe. It has decorated the dorm walls of countless young men and populated the dreams of many more. What accounts for its enduring appeal? American Photo contributing editor Vicki Goldberg looks for an answer in our special feature on page 14. You’ll also find outtakes from the shoot and a memoir

from McBroom, who helped create glamour photography history that day in L.A. Our special portfolio comes from an exhibition that debuted earlier this year at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland. Titled Controverses, the show (which has also been re-created as a Frenchlanguage book) considers the ethical and legal issues raised by a number of images— issues of fakery, censorship, ownership, and exploitation. In other words, the very issues photographers must come to grips with today. Reviewing the exhibition in the New York Times, critic Michael Kimmelman wrote, “By virtue of its economy and proliferation, photography has been one of the most convenient weapons of the powerless even while it serves the powers that be.” I think you’ll find our portfolio to be a fascinating look at the power of photography. I’m also sure you’ll find the imagery of Andreas Gefeller (page 26) to be spectacular, and confusing (in a good way). Gefeller uses a digital SLR in a unique way to explore what lies below us—floors, beaches, park meadows. You’ll see the world in a new way, which is another definition of high-impact photography. By the way, Gefeller leads an American Photo Master Class on page 77.

Above: Outtakes from Bruce McBroom’s 1976 session with Farrah Fawcett.

David Schonauer, EDITOR IN CHIEF

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Design& Functionality By David Briganti, Senior Product Manager, Imaging, Panasonic Consumer Electronics Company

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Panasonic’s Versatile Line Offers a High-Performing LUMIX Digital Camera for All Types of Photographers

s digital imaging technology continues to evolve, photographers benefit from having countless models from which to choose. Now the challenge is to ensure that they get the features and style that best suits them. Every person has different photography needs – some more advanced, while others just want to point, shoot, and capture beautiful photos and videos. Panasonic recognizes that there are photographers of all levels and desires, and that’s its latest LUMIX digital camera models – the DCMC-ZR1, DMC-FP8 and DMC-FZ35 – are so distinctly different from each other in style, design and functionality. The 2009 LUMIX line offers a high-perform-

ing camera for every type of photographer. Panasonic expands its popular FZ-Series with the introduction of the DMC-FZ35, the successor to the FZ28. The LUMIX FZ35 maintains its 18x optical zoom while adding the ability to record AVCHD Lite high definition video, which means it has double the recording time in HD quality compared with the Motion JPEG format. With the ability to shoot HD video, Panasonic adds iA Movie to the FZ35. Panasonic’s Intelligent Auto (iA) allows the camera to automatically choose the best settings and these intuitive features are now available while capturing video. The FZ35 features a stereo microphone to help ensure high-quality audio recording with HD video.

This hybrid digital camera that can shoot both video and still images is perfect for the photographer who needs the added flexibility of an 18x optical zoom but also wants more than still photography. Whether the FZ35 will be used on an outdoor adventure or to photograph the kids from the stands of a soccer game, the FZ35’s flexibility makes it the perfect companion for a photo enthusiast. The LUMIX ZR1, a completely new model for Panasonic, is a truly slim digital camera for those who want a portable camera to carry everyday, yet it maintains a powerful zoom range and is packed with advanced features to help take great photos easily. The ZR1 may be small in size, but the ultra-compact 8x optical zoom and a 25mm wide-angle lens means it has the flexibility to shoot both far and wide. Available in four stylish colors, (blue, red, black and silver) the ZR1 is 34 percent slimmer than Panasonic’s popular LUMIX ZS-Series of digital cameras, which are also highly regarded as a compact super-zoom. The ZR1 is the ideal camera for the person

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looking for a high-performing, everyday camera that can slip in their purse or pocket, yet is powerful enough to capture their memories with high-quality photos. The LUMIX DMC-FP8 features a stylish design and finds the perfect balance of slim, yet still comfortable to use. The digital camera’s flat design is possible thanks to folded optics, and despite its sleek look, the FP8 features a 4.6x optical zoom and 28mm wide-angle lens in black, red or silver. With an illuminated backlit control panel, the FP8 has a futuristic design for the photographer looking for the most cutting-edge style and unique features. With the three new LUMIX models this fall, Panasonic also introduces two new features: Sound Recognition and Power OIS. Panasonic’s innovative Sound Recognition means the digital camera can listen to a second of recorded audio during image capture and the Venus Engine can recognize whether the camera is being used indoors or outdoors. By using this additional information, scenes can be reproduced with further accuracy. And

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This fall, photographers of all skill levels will find that there are many digital cameras with different features available, and they will find the model that best suits their needs. With the introduction of the LUMIX FZ35, FP8 and ZR1, Panasonic expects its extremely versatile and high-performing line will find the right photographer to take advantage of its unique features. Panasonic’s awardwinning line of LUMIX digital cameras has the innovative features to help any level of photographer succeed. Those buying a digital camera as a gift can look for features like Panasonic’s iA, which will help take better photos, regardless of skill level. Whether you’re an experienced photographer, or a beginner, find the digital camera that feels right and start snapping and exploring.

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INSIDE

P H O T O G R A P H Y

The famous Farrah poster, shot by Bruce McBroom in 1976.

14 PUBLIC EYE 20 NEW BOOKS 26 ART 28 IN PRINT

RECONSIDERING THE IMPORTANCE OF FARRAH THE ICON WITH EXTRAVAGANT HAIR

American Photo Mag.com

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PUBLIC EYE

HOW FARRAH SAVED THE CULTURE. ESSAY BY VICKI GOLDBERG

I

n 1976, Farrah Fawcett was just another nobody trying to become a somebody. Though she had only a few commercials and some print advertisements on her resumé, her hair was about to become as famous as Samson’s: Teenage boys were secretly snapping up women’s magazines for her picture in a shampoo ad. A poster producer smelled money and commissioned the photo-

PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRUCE MCBROOM

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graph that would establish Farrah as the number-one somebody of the 1970s. Soon afterward, she was cast as one of three detectives, all equipped with martial arts skills and dynamite bodies, when Charlie’s Angels premiered on TV. They all had long hair too, but gentlemen prefer blondes, and Farrah was golden. She once said, “When the show was number three, I thought it was our acting. When we got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.” (She later went on to be nominated three times for Emmys.) The poster went off like a rocket and became the bestselling pinup of all time, pushing Marilyn Monroe into second place. Farrah earned so much more in poster royalties than she did from Angels that she walked out on the show after a year. In 1977 NASA sent that poster into space in a time capsule on its Oblio probe, and today it hangs in the Smithsonian. Pinups have a long history, but back in the era when Betty Grable in a bathing suit was big news, society mandated a certain pretense to respectability. Andre Bazin, the noted film critic, wrote in 1946 that the pinup “is nothing more than chewing gum for the imagination. Manufactured on the assembly line, standardized by Vargas, sterilized by censorship.” (Vargas was the Esquire magazine illustrator who drew provocatively posed and anatomically impossible women who kept covered—sort of—in abbreviated outfits that were apparently glued on.) Then, in 1947 and 1953, the Kinsey Reports were published; in 1960 the Pill guaranteed women a new sexual openness; and in 1963 Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique

I N S I D E

P H O T O G R A P H Y

© BRUCE MCBROOM

One of Bruce McBroom’s contact sheets from the Farrah poster shoot

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© BRUCE MCBROOM (2)

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P H O T O G R A P H Y

FARRAH REWROTE THE IDEAL

sparked the feminist movement. Actors took off their clothes on stage and screen, while the girl next door doffed them in Playboy. In the early 1970s, Penthouse and Hustler gave new scope to the word explicit.

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y that time feminism had decreed that women could enjoy both sex and their own bodies. (See Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, 1973.) But Farrah rewrote that ideal in capital letters. She remained tantalizing, refusing to pose nude (until 1995, when she made an issue of Playboy the best-selling issue of the decade). In the 1976 poster, her bathing suit coolly covers her, but her erect nipple turns the heat up. She radiates high-voltage good health, with a smile so large it could rival the white keys of a piano. Her extravagant hair, which inspired women all over the map to try (and fail) to match her allure, broadcasts female sexuality, as abundant hair always has. And the Indian blanket behind her, a seat cover grabbed from his car by Bruce McBroom, the photographer, tilts the image toward a symbol of the all-American young woman—a Yankee Venus transplanted from Olympus to the walls of a dorm near you. N

Opposite and here: Two outtakes from the poster shoot

American Photo Mag.com

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M EMOIR

ing from my car. Farrah did her own hair and supplied the nowfamous “wardrobe.” We tried several swimsuits, and, of course, she looked great in all of them. But I felt I didn’t quite have “The Poster” until Farrah finally came out of the house wearing the red suit. I looked through the camera and knew—this was the one! At the end of that long, hot day, while I was packing up my gear, Farrah said to me, “I’m so

BRUCE MCBROOM RECALLS THE FAMOUS LADY IN RED

tired of looking perfect.” She walked over and turned on the hose and drenched herself with water. I ran for my camera and shot a sequence of her with mascara running and hair dripping wet—very sexy. The final image for the poster wasn’t my first choice, but Farrah personally selected it. I shot many rolls of film that day, and Farrah picked that one; her instincts about her image were always correct.

McBroom preferred the water shots. Farrah overruled him.

n a summer day in 1976, I photographed Farrah Fawcett for her famous poster, which has since sold more than 12 million copies. At the time, I was freelancing in Los Angeles by photographing celebrities and rock-and-roll groups like The Doors, The Mamas and the Papas, Frank Zappa, and The Beatles. I had photographed Farrah before, when she first came to Hollywood, and a few years later, when publisher Pro Arts wanted to make a poster with her, she specifically requested that I be the photographer. The shoot was very simple— just Farrah and I, at the home she shared with her husband, Lee Majors. I used a 1973 Nikon F with a 50mm lens and Kodachrome 25 film. I had no artificial lighting, just the California sun and a white bounce card. I supplied the Indian blanket, an impromptu set dress-

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© BRUCE MCBROOM

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he poster started Farrah’s career, and when Charlie’s Angels debuted on TV, the combination of the two made her famous overnight. The success of the poster didn’t really help my career, though, because the publisher refused to give me a photo credit. It was only after the poster became a news story and cultural phenomenon that journalists began asking, “Who shot the poster?” I have tried over the years to understand why it has attracted so much interest from so many people. No one had heard of Farrah Fawcett when Pro Arts asked me to photograph her, and at that time, the idea of charging money for a poster of a relatively anonymous model was unheard of. Though some rock-and-roll posters of famous bands were selling, they were usually given away for free, as a form of publicity. I think the image was a lucky combination of this wholesome, beautiful all-American girl looking directly at you with a dazzling smile and a red suit that covered a lot but revealed a little—just enough. I have been told that Farrah and I created an “iconic” image that day, and I am proud that it stands tall with the classic pinups of Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable, and Marilyn Monroe. In my long career as a still photographer on motion pictures, I have photographed many posters— featuring Eddie Murphy, Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Clint Eastwood, to name a few—but the poster that everyone remembers me for is Farrah. In the thirty-three years since I took the photo, it has hung in museums and has appeared in the background of scenes from popular movies. And people continue to buy it on eBay—including me.

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Left: Buzz Aldrin on the moon, 1969, photo by Neil Armstrong. Below: New astronaut Aldrin (left) in training in 1964.

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ith the heart of a novelist, Norman Mailer knew that mankind was transformed in the instant that the Lunar Landing Module, nicknamed Eagle, came to rest in the Sea of Tranquility, on July 20, 1969. In his 1970 book Of a Fire on the Moon, Mailer told the tale of the Apollo 11 mission, in his own fashion. He saw the greatness of the endeavor, but was astonished by the corporate blandness of NASA. In Neil Armstrong, Mailer found a character whose goal was not individual glory, but a team player whose dry scientific jargon undercut the drama of the moment. Mailer understood that it would require storytellers, himself foremost, to put the grand adventure of Apollo 11 into a human context. In one respect, however, astronauts Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did capture and communicate the astounding nature of their feat: The photographs they made on the moon 40 years ago remain powerful statements about human spirit and vulnerability. In August, Taschen Books released a remarkable photography book combining images from NASA’s archive and other private collections with the text from Mailer’s book. The 350-page Norman Mailer, MoonFire: The Epic Journey of Apollo 11, will come with a signed, framed, and numbered image of Buzz Aldrin. The price? $1,000, except for the as-yet unpriced final 12 copies of the 1,969 limited edition, which will contain fragments of actual moon rocks. On the following pages we present Mailer’s account of the landing. —DAVID SCHONAUER

NEW BOOKS AN ASTONISHING LIMITED-EDITION VOLUME TELLS THE EPIC STORY OF THE JOURNEY OF APOLLO 11 IN PHOTOS AND THE WORDS OF NORMAN MAILER American Photo Mag.com

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Left: The Lunar Module “Eagle” lifts off from the moon, July 21, 1969. Below: A historic footprint and President Kennedy in 1962.

DESTINY WITH HISTORY THE APOLLO LANDING TEXT BY NORMAN MAILER S

o one got ready for the climax of the greatest week since Christ was born….The LEM having flown around the moon and gone behind it again, the braking burn for the Descent Orbit Initiation would be begun in radio silence…. Phrases came through the general static of the public address system. “Eagle looking great, you’re go,” came through, and statements of altitude. “You’re go for landing, over!” “Roger, understand. Go for landing. 3,000 feet.” “We’re go, hang tight, we’re go. 2,000 feet.” So the voice came out of the box. Somewhere a quarter of a million miles away, ten years of engineering and training, a thousand processes and a million parts, a huge swatch out of 25 billion dollars and a hovering of machinery were preparing to

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go through the funnel of a historical event whose significance might yet be next to death itself, and the reporters who would interpret this information for the newsprint readers of the world were now stirring in polite, if mounting, absorption with the calm cryptic technological voices which came droning out of the box. Was it like that as one was waiting to be born? Did one wait in a modern room with strangers while numbers were announced—“Soul 77-48-16— you are on call. Proceed to Staging Area CX—at 16:04 you will be conceived.” So the words came. And the moon came nearer. “3½ down, 220 feet, 13 forward, 11 forward, coming down nicely, 200 feet, 4½ down, 5½ down, 160, 6½ down, 5½ down, 9 forward, 5 percent. Quantity light. 75 feet. Things looking good. Down a half. 6 forward. “Sixty seconds,” said another voice. Was that a reference to fuel? Had that been the Capcom? Or was it Aldrin or Armstrong? Who was speaking now? The static was a presence. The voice was almost dreamy. Only the thinnest reed of excitement quivered in the voice. “Lights on. Down 2½. Forward. Forward. Good. 40 feet down. Down 2½. Picking up some dust. 30 feet, 2½ down. Faint shadow. 4 forward. Drifting to the right a little. 6…down a half.” Another voice said, “Thirty seconds.” Was that thirty seconds of fuel? A modest stirring of anticipation came from the audience. “Drifting right. Contact light.

IT WAS THE VOICE OF THE BEST BOY IN TOWN Okay,” said the voice as even as before, “engine stop. ACA out of détente. Modes control both auto, descent engine command override, off. Engine arm, off. 423 is in.” A cry went up, half jubilant,

Left: Armstrong photographs the Sea of Tranquility. Below: An early space program image.

half confused. Had they actually landed? The Capcom spoke. “We copy you down, Eagle.” But it was a question. “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” It was Armstrong’s voice, the quiet voice of the best boy in town, the one who pulls you drowning from the sea and walks off before you can offer a reward. The Eagle has landed. Excerpt from Norman Mailer, MoonFire: The Epic Journey of Apollo 11, courtesy Taschen Books.

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© ANDREAS GEFELLER/COURTESY HASTED HUNT GALLERY

“Untitled (Panel Building 1) Berlin, 2004”

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ART A VISUAL PUZZLE MADE ONE STEP AT A TIME S

ometimes photographers are so busy looking out at the world that they forget to look up, or down. Andreas Gefeller is certainly interested in what is overhead, but he’s totally tuned into what’s underfoot. Here, for example, you see an image he created in 2004, showing what appears to be the floor plan of a building in Berlin, Germany. Gefeller creates such mind-bending visual puzzles as this in a relatively simple, but painstaking, way. In this case, he photographed every square inch of one floor of the building using a Canon EOS 5D with a 35mm focal-length lens, which he supports at a height of five or six feet with an unsplayed tripod that serves as a sort of boom. Then he stitches all the images together in Photoshop. “I like to make people think about whether the images are truth or fiction,” he says. Gefeller’s latest series, called Supervisions, was on exhibition at the Hasted Hunt Gallery in Manhattan earlier this year. For more, visit andreasgefeller.com, or see Master Class on page 77.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREAS GEFELLER American Photo Mag.com

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Antoine Verglas’s airy photos of model Julie Henderson, for Italian GQ

© ANTOINE VERGLAS (2)

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IN PRI NT J ULIE

HENDERSON LOOKS SEXY AND FEELS SEXY A

ntoine Verglas’s resume is enough to make any man jealous. The New York-based photographer has been a mainstay imagemaker in men’s magazines since their heyday in the late ‘90s, shooting for Maxim, GQ, FHM, and the much-anticipated swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. And from this enviable career of working intimately with the world’s most stunning women, Verglas has discovered the key to creating alluring photographs (to which his pictures of model Julie Henderson, taken for Italian GQ, can attest). The trick is to remember that a model may look sexy, but ultimately she must feel sexy too. “If you want a woman to look relaxed in a picture,” Verglas muses, “you cannot put her on a cement floor. Cement will make her body language look hard. If you put her on a bed, it’s going to get softer. And if you put her on a very luxurious rug, it’ll be even softer still.” He smiles. “I have used so many white rugs over the years because a woman just feels more sensual with something thick and fluffy.” No need to take his word for

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANTOINE VERGLAS American Photo Mag.com

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© ANTOINE VERGLAS

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“Julie knows which poses and expressions work for her,” Verglas says.

“I’VE USED MANY WHITE RUGS OVER THE YEARS” it, though; his photos of the captivating Henderson—occasionally modeling with that omnipresent rug—are carefree and undeniably sexy, easily proving his theory. Verglas is quick to note, however, that Henderson is no novice at being in front of the camera. She has modeled since the age of 13 and has found a solid fan base in recent years with three consecutive Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions, for which Verglas first photographed her. “Julie knows which poses and expressions work for her,” he says, “and I was very happy to work with her again [for GQ].”

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lthough men’s magazines have taken a blow in recent years due to the availability of material on the Internet, Verglas has no intention of abandoning his sensual aesthetic. Instead he’s expanding the scope of his photography to include fashion and portraiture, for both celebrities and everyday women. “I have clients who see my photos in magazines, and they say, ‘Oh, I would love to have a sexy portrait session,’ or sometimes a husband will give a session to his wife as a gift,” Verglas explains of this new chapter. “When you get known for a particular style, people start seeking you out. And when you enjoy it like I do, you do it well.” —LINDSAY SAKRAIDA

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Here: Henderson glows with Verglas’s signature lighting. Bottom right: Verglas’s sketch of the photo shoot’s lighting scheme.

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© ANTOINE VERGLAS

VERGLAS ON LIGHT KEEP IT SOFT H

ard lighting is au courant, often sacrificing beauty for a sense of realism or a more graphic image quality. But Antoine Verglas is not one for fashion—at least not in its trendy

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sense. “I like soft lighting,” says the classically minded photographer. “I think it’s flattering.” The effectiveness of soft light depends on “the girl and the situation,” says Verglas. For his backlit photographs of model Julie Henderson, soft light was ideal. In fact he made the backlight doubly soft, placing two 3x4-foot Chimera softboxes directly behind the model, then setting up a 12x12-foot “silk” in front of them. Each softbox was powered by a 3200 wattsecond Broncolor Grafit A4 pack set to 2500 watt-seconds. Front lighting was also doubly softened by a 7-foot-diameter Westcott Octabank, an eightsided softbox that incorporates

two internal diffusion layers, also powered by a Grafit A4. The Octabank was positioned behind and slightly to the right of Verglas’s 17-megapixel Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II; standing lighting flats off-camera to the left bounced additional light in from

the side. The model’s skin was well-moisturized so that her “curves,” as Verglas puts it, would reflect the strong backlight more brightly. “We just wanted to make it look like she was in front of a big window,” says the photographer. —RUSSELL HART

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The annual American PHOTO Images of the Year event is an international competition that is a definitive showcase of the very best of contemporary photography. This juried photo contest offers unmatched exposure to both established and emerging photographers in a wide range of fields, from documentary/ photojournalism to cutting-edge commercial work and will provide an unprecedented opportunity for peer review of your work by professional photographers, museum curators, art critics and influential editors. Winners will be selected on the basis of originality and the overall quality of concept execution.

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TYLER HICKS/NEW YORK TIMES

BAND OF BROTHERS TEXT BY REGIS LE SOMMIER

WHILE SHOOTING THE STORIES OF THEIR LIVES IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN, THREE PHOTOGRAPHERS KNOW THEY CAN DEPEND ON EACH OTHER AND THE L ESSONS THEY LEARNED LONG AGO AT A SMALL NEWSPAPER IN OHIO.

New York Times photojournalist Tyler Hicks made this image during a firefight in the Korangal Valley of Afghanistan in April. American Photo Mag.com

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Tyler Hicks, left, in Afghanistan in 2006

“ SMALL

NEWSPAPERS BECAME THE GENERATORS OF PHOTOGRAPHIC TALENT BECAUSE OF THE VITAL CONNECTION THEY HAVE TRADITIONALLY MAINTAINED WITH LOCAL COMMUNITIES.” MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TYLER HICKS, CHRIS HONDROS, AND SPENCER PLATT

Spencer Platt in Basra, Iraq, 2003

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Chris Hondros in Monrovia, Liberia, 2003

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people. We completed the story and sent it off to France, where it was well received by my editors. Later, Chris and I hooked up again on a far different story. He was based in Iraq, and when I

CHRIS HONDROS

met Chris Hondros on a freezing day in February 2004 in Toledo, Ohio. At the time, I was the U.S. bureau chief of Paris Match, and I was covering presidential candidate John Kerry as he campaigned through this important swing state. For me, the trip was an opportunity to learn about what middle America was really like, and I was getting quite a view, crisscrossing the state from Poland to Cleveland, Canton to Columbus, and south to the outskirts of Cincinnati. I needed a good photographer to help me cover the story, and Hondros, a photojournalist with Getty Images, had been sent. We immediately got along. He knew the shots I needed for the story and seemed to have a real sense of the place and a rapport with its

went there to work on a story about the American military I asked him to shoot the pictures. In 2006 we traveled to New Orleans to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Shortly after

that we got together for lunch in New York and began reminiscing about our first assignment together, back in Ohio. Chris finally explained to me why he knew the state so well: He had started his photography career at Ohio’s Troy Daily News, a classic small-town newspaper. That was back in 1991, when Hondros, then 20 years old, was about to graduate from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, up the road from his hometown of Fayetteville. He was looking for an internship and had applied to almost 30 newspapers all over the country. “I didn’t get anything,” he recalled. “I still have 30 rejection letters somewhere.” Then he heard from Jim Witmer, the photo editor (continued on page 42) of the

The darkroom at the Troy Daily News, circa 1994

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TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

“ THE PHOTOS ALMOST COST HIM HIS LIFE ” Tyler Hicks has been covering the war in Afghanistan off and on since 2001. In April, embedded with a group of American soldiers in the Korangal Valley, he produced what may be his most dramatic combat images, and it almost cost him his life. The image at left shows Private First Class Richard Dewater, 21, as he walked across a plank over a rainswollen river. After taking the picture, Hicks reviewed it on the LCD screen of his D-SLR and decided the composition wasn’t correct. He waited and photographed another soldier on the plank, then ran to catch up with Dewater. As Hicks ran toward the soldier, a bomb exploded under Dewater, killing him. It was an ambush by Taliban fighters. Hicks and another soldier ran downstream and tried to ford the river. With his 40 pounds of body armor and camera gear, Hicks was submerged and realized his cameras were out of commission. Times correspondent C. J. Chivers lent him a point-and-shoot, and Hicks continued to cover the firefight. His pictures were published on April 20.

TYLER HICKS American Photo Mag.com

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“ BOTH PARENTS IN THE CAR WERE KILLED ”

On January 18, 2005, Hondros snapped a series of images that seemed to sum up the troubled American occupation of Iraq. An Iraqi family traveling in a car through the city of Tel Afar failed to stop at a U.S. military checkpoint. American soldiers, always aware that such cars might be filled with explosives, opened fire on the vehicle. Both parents in the car were killed, and one of the family’s five children was seriously injured. After the car stopped, a young girl emerged, covered with her parents’ blood. The images generated a storm of interest around the world, and the injured boy was flown to the United States for treatment.

CHRIS HONDROS American Photo Mag.com

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CHRIS HONDROS

SPENCER PLATT Left: Hicks in Ohio, circa 1994. Below left: Hondros at the Troy Daily News. Center: Spencer Platt.

light. It was before computers, so we were printing pictures in the darkroom. The deadline was 9:00 a.m., and the paper came out at 2:00 p.m. You would mostly shoot pictures the day before and leave them on the editor’s desk. One day a week the photographers would have an entire page for themselves.”

PICTURE HAD TO STAND ON ITS OWN ” American Photo Mag.com

n 1994, the newspaper’s photo editor left, and the job of finding new interns was given to Hondros. One of the portfolios he looked at came from a young photographer named Tyler Hicks. “He had one of the best,” says Hondros. “Stuff from Guatemala…crazy stuff.” Shortly after Hicks arrived at the newspaper for his internship, Hondros left to continue his studies at Ohio University in Athens, two hours away. Hicks eventually ended up taking over Hondros’s job, then filled the intern slot with a friend, Spencer Platt, whom he’d known from Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut. “My introduction to the newspaper was on a sultry Ohio evening,” recalls Platt. “The darkroom was a world of chemistry, film dryers, blaring radios, and snapshots pinned to a wall from dozens of photographers who had made brief stays in Troy.” Like Hondros, Hicks and Platt used their brief stays in Troy to launch their careers. Hicks now works for the New York Times and has (continued on page 86)

SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

CHRIS HONDROS

“ THE

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recalled Hondros. “The picture had to stand on its own. There had to be a certain flare to it. We were pushing ourselves. That’s where I learned about GETTY IMAGES

(continued from page 37) Troy Daily News at the time, who offered him an internship for the following January. Hondros started with a salary of $200 a week, not enough to get a motel room. Instead, he found a windowless room above the local photo store for $45 a week. The job required him to shoot two feature pictures every day, one in color for the front page, one in black and white for the inside. “It could be children playing, people working, just anything,”

On August 15, 2006, Platt spent the morning walking through a bombedout neighborhood in Beirut, photographing people returning to what was left of their homes. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a red convertible full of attractive young Lebanese dart into the scene. He had only a moment to take this picture,

which captured the surreal nature of modern lifestyle and ancient antagonisms. The remarkable image won first place in the 2008 World Press Photo of the Year competition. Platt, who graduated from Clark University with a degree in English, has during his photography career also worked in Liberia, Albania, Congo, and Iraq.

W I T N E S S

“ HE HAD ONLY A MOMENT TO SHOOT ”

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Olympus E-P1 Form and function are equal partners in this remarkable interchangeable-lens camera. Like Olympus D-SLRs, it incorporates a full-size Four Thirds–format image sensor; like Panasonic’s Lumix GH1, it dispenses with a reflex mirror and pentaprism, substituting an electronic viewfinder for optical TTL viewing. And the much smaller dimensions permitted by the absence of a mirror box and prism housing have allowed Olympus to make this new 12.3-megapixel model a clear homage to 1963’s Olympus Pen F—a celebrated SLR that stayed small by shooting half frames on 35mm film. But the stainless-steel E-P1, which also comes in white with tan trim, is only half the size equation. The shortened lensto-sensor distance and a smaller mount diameter allow its Micro Four Thirds–format lenses to be much more compact, though with adapters you can mount existing Zuiko Digital optics (for other E-series models) and OM-series lenses from Olympus’s 35mm days. And while the E-P1 may look old-fashioned, it shoots 720p HD video. Stay tuned for a full field test of this surprising, classy camera. About $800 (with 14-42mm).

Right: The Olympus E-P1 with the 17mm M.Zuiko Digital and dedicated viewfinder. Below: Its 14-42mm standard zoom. Bottom: The 17mm and finder, FL-14 flash, and lens adapter.

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Wacom Intuos4 Wacom’s next-generation pen tablet features the greatest pressure-sensitivity range yet—2,048 levels, detecting the slightest touch of the pen tip. (The pen itself has a pressure-sensitive eraser and two side switches for customized commands.) But the Intuos4’s industrial-chic design places all the Express Keys and new four-way Touch Ring to one side of its wideformat working surface, so that all can be operated with the nonpen hand. (Left-handers simply rotate the tablet.) New illuminated displays on all but the smallest tablet—active areas on the four available sizes range from 3.9x6.2to 12x18.2 inches—remind you what each key and the ring do, even changing automatically when you switch applications. About $425 (Large/8x12.8 inches).

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The size of a big coat button, this sculpted rubbery clip is entirely practical. Uncover its adhesive backing and stick it wherever you need to keep a computer cable and plug (USB or otherwise) in position. Then you simply push the cable into its slot. The CableDrop clip is especially handy with devices you’re always unplugging, whether a laptop or a card reader—preventing the plug from dropping behind your desk. It comes in either a muted color scheme (two each of offwhite, rusty

red, and warm gray) or a bright one (two each of orange, pink, and green). About $10 for six.

Microsoft Arc Mouse The most elegant computer mouse we’ve seen, Microsoft’s wireless Arc Mouse uses its arched design to give you the comfortable grip of a full-sized mouse, but it folds in the middle so it’s the size of a notebook mouse for transport. Folding it also turns off power to preserve its two AAA batteries. The body of its wireless transceiver, which slips into a computer’s USB port, isn’t much bigger than its own plug, and fits snugly inside the folded mouse when not in use. Color choices now range from eggplant purple to green emerald. About $35.

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T900 Sony’s sleek 12-megapixel touchscreen compact is all you could want in a pocket camera. Its halfinch-thick stainless-steel body is a handsome brushed silver, though fashion-conscious photographers may prefer it in red, brown, or black. And its 3.5-inch, 921,000dot LCD is spectacularly crisp; in addition to providing touch control of camera settings, it allows you to choose what part of the subject you want to focus on simply by touching it on the screen. (In playback, touch any part of the screen to zoom into that area of the image.) Touch-focusing the 4X zoom could be the closest you come to manual control, however, because the T900 automates everything—with scene recognition, face and smile detection, and the ability to identify and save the less squinty of two sequential shots. And, duh, it shoots 720p HD video. About $325.

picture with a modern, computerinspired design that incorporates a brilliant 480x800-pixel LCD. The screen tilts and can be quickly rotated on its smooth-operating hinge from “landscape” to “portrait” orientation, so that verticals fill its full seven-inch, 16:9-format image area. (An automatic sensor orients the pictures properly.) The Kaleido displays pictures stored on its 512MB internal memory, a small-format memory card, or a USB flash drive—but the difference is that you can also stream photographs and other content from your computer (local or RSS) directly to the frame via your home’s wireless network. Separate channels for iPhoto albums can even be set up. Imagine cycling through your entire archive before repeating a picture! About $200.

Ipevo Kaleido R7

Canon PowerShot D10 Canon’s first waterproof digital compact reminds us of the erstwhile futuristic camera designs created for the company by Luigi Colani, stylist of the fabled Canon T90. This 12-megapixel model’s submarine shape isn’t just for looks, though: It’s rated to operate as deep as 33 feet, lower than its competitors. Its 2.5-inch LCD and optically stabilized 35-105mm (equivalent) zoom are modest for use underwater, where a bigger screen and shorter focal length would be more help. But the D10 is also freezeproof to 14 degrees Fahrenheit, and shockproof for drops of up to four feet. About $300.

Canon PowerShot D10

SanDisk card readers

SanDisk ImageMate Readers SanDisk’s new memory card readers are faster at reading and writing, as you’d expect, but they’re also

Ipevo Kaleido R7 Digital picture frames are now as affordable as they are tacky—and often disappointing in their display quality. The Kaleido changes the

D ESIGN A WARDS American Photo Mag.com

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Pentax K2000 Limited Edition “tropical” cameras of yore. Many of those models were built as much for show as for their woods’ resistance to tropical climes, so it’s fitting that the Hog Ranch (now being used on the set of TV’s Bones by photo director Gordon Lonsdale) has a leopard-skin bellows and tortoise-shell accents. Fortunately, both are faux. About, gulp, $20,000.

Pentax K2000 Limited Edition Not only is this stylish version of the compact, lightweight Pentax K2000 finished in clean white, but the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 and 50-200mm f/4-5.6 zooms in its “kit” are a matching white—all the better to stay cool in hot sun. (The camera’s grip and the lenses’ zoom ring and front are a contrasting black.) Don’t let the 10.2-megapixel resolution or 2.7inch LCD screen prevent you from being fashion-forward: That’s plenty of resolution for most printing purposes, and there’s no LCD live view anyway. Plus you get automatic sensor dust removal and sensorshifting shake compensation, which steadies the image with either lens —and lots of other Pentax K-mount optics. About $700 (including the two lenses!).

Sony HVLF20

Littman 45 Single Hog Ranch

Sony HVL-F20 flash

D ESIGN A WARDS much smaller and have been elegantly restyled. Featuring a modernist, square-edged design with a glossy black finish, the readers attach magnetically to an angled, three-footed metallic base for space-saving upright use, but they can be lifted off for transport or flat placement. The All-in-One version accepts virtually all card formats and tops out at a 34MB/ second transfer speed with SanDisk’s Extreme IV (45MB/second) CF

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card. The diminutive Multi-Format version is designed for smaller card formats, including SD, SDHC, Memory Stick, and xD, and achieves 30MB/second reading with an SDHC card of equal speed. About $30 and $20.

Littman 45 Single Hog Ranch The maker of the world’s first and only single-window, coupledrangefinder, parallax-free 4x5 has brought fashion to its product’s

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large-format functionality. The custom-designed models in the Littman Opus + Arte Collection pick up on the retro-chic style of its retooled Polaroid 110 instant film cameras. One of our favorites is the Hog Ranch (shown here), an homage to photographer Peter Beard’s famous Kenyan compound. Its warm color scheme and exotic materials—including Noble African woods such as Ambonya burl and tigered bamboo—recall the wooden

C H O I C E

A pop of flash can save even the most well-lighted subject, filling in shadows or, in a dimmer setting, mixing with low ambient light for slow-sync effects. But the built-in flash on typical D-SLRs can be too weak for effective fill at all but the closest distances, and it’s so close to the lens that it risks red-eye in low light. Sony’s ingenious pocketsized flash is a compromise between built-in units and a full-sized shoemount strobe. It’s twice as powerful as the former, and you can leave it comfortably mounted in the hotshoe because a clever hinge allows it to fold flat against the camera’s prism. Lift it into shooting position and the tube is displaced enough from the lens to greatly reduce redeye. About $100. —RUSSELL HART

F LICKR C REATIVE SHOWCASE MACIEJ DAKOWICZ

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hotography has always been considered a democratic medium of expression. But the Flickr photo-sharing website has transformed photography into a global community that, perhaps more than any other phenomenon in history, embodies the idea of art for the masses. And that art can be surprisingly fine. Here we inaugurate our Flickr Creative Showcase, in which we profile a talented photographer from the ranks of Flickr’s millions of members. Look for our special gatefold in each issue. WINNER SEPTEMBER /OCTOBER

Above: a photo from “Cardiff at Night,” by Maciej Dakowicz

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MACIE J DAKOWICZ CARDIFF, WALES

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MACIEJ DAKOWICZ (3)

Maciej Dakowicz Cardiff, Wales http://www.flickr.com/ photos/maciejdakowicz/

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agazines love to make lists. The top ten of this or the five best of that are powerful ways to engage readers. So when American Photo featured the work of 12 “Flickr Superstars” in our May/June issue, the story created quite a buzz on the massively popular photo-sharing website. Some Flickrites seemed pleased by our choices, or at least happy that we’d done a story about Flickr. Others complained vigorously. We were happy when member Kara Baker started a new Flickr group in response to our story— a group in which members (now nearing 1,000) submit their own 12 Flickr Superstars. (Now that’s democracy!) “The whole point of the group is to celebrate who inspires you, who intrigues you, and who you’re learning from,” says the Brooklyn, New York-based Baker. “I now have a whole new and brilliant group of friends, and we go on photo walks and mini shoots. I’ve learned so much.” You’ll see that for yourself if you visit Baker’s excellent photostream at flickr.com; her screen name is Omeyisland. The first photographer we feature in our new Flickr Creative Showcase is someone whose name comes up again and again in the 12 Flickr Superstars group

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An image from “Cardiff at Night” by Maciej Dakowicz

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“I’m drawn to complex compositions,” says Dakowicz of his Cardiff work, below.

and elsewhere on the site: Cardiff, Wales-based Maciej Dakowicz. Dakowicz’s huge body of work exports a Raghubir Singh–like sensibility to the most far-flung parts of the globe, which he often travels to with the help of NGOs. “I’m drawn to complex compositions, photos with several layers in them,” he says. “When I travel, I spend most of my time in cities, photographing street life.” The 33-year-old photographer, who was born in Poland, has created some of his

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strongest work in his new hometown, brilliantly capturing Cardiff’s lively youth culture and raucous nightlife, and that’s what we feature here. Check out Dakowicz’s Flickr photostream and website (maciejdakowicz.com) to see more of this fine work. And while you’re at it please visit Flickr’s new American Photo group. There you’ll be able to weigh in on who we feature in the Flickr Creative Showcase and to learn how to get your own work considered for publication.

C R E A T I V E

S H O W C A S E

In this family, everyone is photogenic. The Sony®

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o a Google search for “orphan works” and you’ll get nearly half a million hits. Yet most photographers don’t know the meaning of this strange phrase, nor that it has important legal implications. In fact, it’s the focus of a raging battle over copyright. An orphan work is a document, artwork, photograph, or other creation that is protected by copyright law against unauthorized use but whose owner is either unknown or cannot be found—making it virtually impossible for someone to get permission to use the work. As the law currently stands, anyone who uses a copyrighted work without the owner’s permission, including an orphan work, can be held fully liable for infringement, even if he or she made every effort to locate the copyright holder. Such statutory damages can range from $750 to $150,000 if the copyrighted work was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office before the infringement or within 30 days of its creation and/or publication. (If the work wasn’t registered, the infringer is only liable for “actual damages,” such as the amount the photographer might have realized from selling his image. Actual damages are usually far smaller than statutory damages.) Proposed congressional legislation that will more than likely become law limits this liability. It says that if someone who wants to use an orphan work conducts a “qualifying search”—defined as a reasonable and “diligent” search using every available source and technology, including printed material and electronic databases—that person is protected from statutory damages. If the copyright holder eventually appears, the infringer

THE LAW AN ORPHAN WORKS LAW MIGHT NOT BE AS BAD AS YOU THINK. BY MICHELLE BOGRE

has to pay the owner only an amount that a “willing buyer and willing seller” would have agreed on before the infringement.

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any photographers and artists are up in arms about a possible orphan works law. Alarmist headlines and subject lines litter the Internet, compelling people to sign petitions, forward e-mails, and urge friends and colleagues to oppose orphan works legislation. Unfortunately most of these missives contain misleading, inaccurate, and, in some cases, false information. Among the misinformation are variations of a few claims: that orphan works legislation will “rob” photographers of copyright; that it will allow users to

pay “whatever they consider reasonable”; that it allows users to “escape all legal liability by claiming they didn’t know who they were stealing from.” The legislation as currently written isn’t perfect, but it’s not the disaster that many portray it to be. And it is inevitable that an orphan works bill will be passed by Congress because it addresses the pervasive difficulties faced by publishers, libraries, museums, universities, and filmmakers who want to use an orphan work but can’t or don’t because of the risk and liability of statutory damages if the copyright owner does appear. “We’ve never thought that an orphan works law would be Armageddon for photographers,” says Eugene Mopsik, executive director of the American Society

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of Media Photographers. “If there is room for reasonable compensation once the artist is located, we can live with that.” If user/infringers have not conducted a diligent search or do not negotiate a reasonable fee in good faith, they lose the protection of the proposed legislation and will be liable for statutory or actual damages. So practically speaking, those artists who have not registered their work in a timely fashion would be no worse off, and in some cases they would be better off, because the user has a legal obligation to try to find them before using the work. “The idea that you have to look for someone is a new concept that will benefit photographers who haven’t registered their work,” says Nancy Wolff, noted copyright lawyer and author of The Professional Photographer’s Legal Handbook (Allworth Press). However, the photographer who has registered an orphan work in a timely fashion will lose the right to sue for statutory damages. That could mean a potential loss of revenue. This proposed legislation does a good job of balancing the needs of copyright owners with the very real need to limit liability for some uses of orphan works. Both House and Senate versions require that the copyright office certify two databases that can be searchable by image. When orphan works legislation passes, it will encourage many productive uses that aren’t possible now. Maybe the curators at the Holocaust Museum finally will be able to use the millions of pages of archival documents, photographs, oral histories, and reels of film that, as they have stated before Congress, now just sit in their archives because they can’t afford the liability of damages under the existing law.

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Photographs have always had the power to cause

CONTROVERSIES IMAGES THAT HAVE DEFINED THE E T H ICS OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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trouble. More than books, more than painting, photographic images create a visceral response in viewers. Over the years, that has led to censorship by governments, legal battles in courts, and struggles to establish codes of proper behavior by imagemakers. A brilliant exhibition at the Musée de l’Elysée in Switzerland earlier this year, and a related new book available only in French, explore the various controversies associated with photographs. On the following pages, we present a glimpse at the issues the show raised. They are worth understanding, because photography remains a powerful, and troublesome, medium.

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CREATION AND CONSEQUENCE ESSAY BY DAN I EL GI RARDIN

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laced at the intersection of private and public worlds, a photograph elicits an eminently subjective response. Photographs are therefore a source of endless debates and conflicts. Laws, attitudes, and the limits of what is acceptable in terms of representation vary from one country or culture to another. This makes the question all the more complex, but it is also what makes it so interesting. The numerous controversies associated with photography throughout its history highlight the diversity of possible interpretations and the insoluble paradox of freedom and constraint that constitutes photography itself. Photographers, whatever their field of activity, are bound by a series of laws the limits of which are constantly being tested, with jurisprudence usually lagging behind the evolution of attitudes and techniques. Certain laws are not enforced since they no longer correspond to practice at a particular time, whereas others evolve as a result of court decisions. Photographs that have been published for many years can suddenly be forbidden, while others begin to circulate freely after a long period underground. It is all a question of how the pictures are interpreted, of the meaning that is read into them. Ever since 1839, when photography is officially considered to have been invented, photographers have had to fight for their images to be acknowledged (continued on page 88)

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SYMBOL OF DISTRUST If artist Andres Serrano had painted his infamous image titled “Piss Christ,” instead of producing it as a photograph, would the work have become the focus of so much controversy? Serrano made the image in 1987 by photographing a small plastic crucifix submerged in a transparent container filled with urine— likely his own—and cow’s blood. The image, he said, explored obsessions about sex and religion. The piece was a winner of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art’s “Awards in the Visual Arts” competition, and Serrano was awarded $15,000. The competition, as it turned out, was sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. When “Piss Christ” was exhibited in 1989, two United States senators, Alphonse D’Amato and Jesse Helms, were outraged. The NEA’s budget was slashed and funding was directed at less controversial art. In the years since, the image has continued to be a focal point for issues of censorship and publicly funded art.

© ANDRES SERRANO

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“ EXPERTS COULD NOT GUARANTEE FAKERY. ”

THE FAIRIES OF COTTINGLEY

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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, was a mathematician at Oxford University, a writer of children’s literature, and a passionate photographer. He met Alice Liddell, the daughter of an associate at Oxford, when she was five years old. She inspired his tale of Wonderland, published in 1865, and, along with other young girls, was the subject of many of his photos. Largely because of his images, there has long been speculation that Carroll’s interest in Alice was sexual in nature. The ambiguous nature of photographs often invites such debate; people have layered onto Carroll’s images facts about the man himself—he was single and shy and suffered from epilepsy—to arrive at conclusions that have not and ultimately cannot be proven.

Photography’s ability to capture reality in great detail has produced a powerful belief system— one illustrated by two girls who used photographs to convince an entire country that they had seen fairies. In 1917, Frances Griffiths and her cousin Elsie Wright, age 10 and 16 respectively, spent the summer in Elsie’s family home in Cottingley, Great Britain. They played for hours in the countryside behind the house, returning with tales of fairies and imps that they encountered there. Later, Elsie borrowed her father’s camera, and the photographs the girls made revealed the fairies with great realism. The story spread and was eventually heard by Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle had the images examined by experts at Kodak, who could not guarantee fakery. He then published them in Strand magazine, and in 1922 he published a book on the subject. Throughout the decades the two girls held that the images were authentic, until 1981, when they admitted fabricating the images by copying book illustrations.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

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CHARACTER AS ICON

Can a persona created for the camera be copyrighted? The issue was not entirely clear in 1925, when film star Charlie Chaplin sued the company that had released a film called The Race Track, starring a Mexican actor named Charles Amador, who had changed his name to “Charlie Aplin” and begun imitating the famous persona of The Little Tramp created by Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin charged plagiarism, and his lawyers presented photos of the Tramp character as evidence.The defense claimed that Chaplin himself had borrowed ideas from other actors, but Chaplin won.

ROY EXPORT SAS

Thanks to a photo of Oscar Wilde taken by a man named Napoleon Sarony, photographers today enjoy legal rights that were once very much in question. In the 1860s, the theater become widely popular in America, giving birth to a cult of celebrity. Performers like Lily Langtry and Sarah Bernhardt needed photos for promotion, and they went to Sarony, who opened a studio on Broadway in New York City in 1866. He soon realized that he could make money by selling his images of celebrities to the public at large and began paying stars for the rights to their images. In 1883 Sarony learned that a portrait he had made of Oscar Wilde had been copied and sold to the public by the Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company. Sarony sued, maintaining that his direction of the subject, the décor, and the lighting amounted to intellectual and artistic ownership of the image. He prevailed and helped establish the photographer as an auteur and photography as an art.

CULT OF CELEBRITY

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On October 26, 1941, Lithuanian soldiers collaborating with the German army executed three Soviet resistance fighters in the streets of Minsk. After the war, the two hanged men were celebrated as heroes of the Soviet Union. The young girl executed with them remained anonymous. In 1968, a Russian journalist identified her as Masha Bruskina, just 17 when she was killed. Her identity was not fully accepted until 1996, however, probably because she was a Jew. The cover-up resulted from Joseph Stalin’s post-war anti-Semitic campaigns. But the photo remained as evidence.

AWASH IN EVIL When the world saw David E. Scherman’s photo of Lee Miller in Adolf Hitler’s Munich bathtub, controversy erupted. Was this an act of subversive art, or was it a tasteless joke? Miller was one of the few women journalists accredited to cover the war in Europe, and Scherman was a photographer for Life magazine. Both were present on April 29, 1945, when the Dachau concentration camp was liberated. That night, in Munich, they discovered an apartment belonging to the führer. The photo they shot the following day was carefully arranged. The symbolism—Miller is literally washing away Hitler’s evil—is clear. She had been inculcated in the ideas of surrealism years before, when she was the muse of Man Ray, but many people found this image of her to be offensive. Ultimately, the picture was, for Miller, a macabre memory: She told friends that, in spite of her bath, the odor of Dachau remained on her skin.

THE HEROINE OF MINSK UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

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THE KISSING NUN

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Fashion photographer Oliviero Toscani is probably most famous as the creative genius behind an 18-year-long ad campaign that turned Benetton into one of the most famous brand names in the world. The campaign was also controversial, proving once again that creating shock and sales are not mutually exclusive goals. Toscani’s images illustrated the company’s “United Colors of Benetton” slogan. In one famous photograph, he showed a black woman breastfeeding a white baby. But perhaps his most controversial picture showed a priest and nun kissing. By challenging the principle of religious celibacy, the image encourages viewers to think about traditional constraints. It was also seen as an attack against the basic notions of Roman Catholicism. The Italian government, facing pressure from the Vatican, banned the ad. In France, the Office for the Surveillance of Advertising Practices demanded the withdrawal of posters featuring the image. So who was the winner in this battle of ideas?

THE SMELL OF MONEY

A commercial photograph’s success or failure can depend on three little words: location, location, location. A case in point was the print ad campaign for the popular Yves Saint Laurent fragrance named Opium. Photographer Steven Meisel’s images appeared in magazines around the world without causing a commotion. But when his shot of model Sophie Dahl lying on her back wearing jewelery and stilettos was featured on street signs in Britain, there was an outcry. What was acceptable in one context seemed too explicit in another. The British Advertising Standards Authority eventually demanded removal of the street ad panels.

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“ IN THE END, IT WAS AN E T HICAL PUZ ZLE. ”

LADY DIANA’S LAST PHOTO

© JACQUES LANGEVIN/COURTESY MUSÉE DE L’ELYSÉE

The car crash that took the life of Diana Spencer, Dodi Al-Fayed, and their chauffeur on the night of August 31, 1997 unleashed a series of lawsuits and criticism focusing on photographers. After the accident, it was announced that the driver of the car, Henri Paul, was drunk when he struck a pillar of a tunnel in Paris at high speed. Nonetheless, nine photographers who were part of the fatal street race were charged with manslaughter. In 1999 the case was dropped, but the image of celebrity photographers—especially aggressive paparazzi—was darkened. Respected Sygma photojournalist Jacques Langevin, who had covered events like the uprising in Tiananmen Square in 1989, made this image outside Diana’s hotel as the chase began. He was later charged with violating “the private life” of the deceased and was ordered to pay one euro to Mohammed Al-Fayed, Dodi’s father. In the end, the role of the photographers became a complex ethical puzzle, with newspapers, magazines, and television condemning the photographers while eagerly publishing their shots to the delight of an avid audience.

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© FRANK FOURNIER/COURTESY MUSÉE DE L’ELYSÉE

TALE OF OMAYRA Frank Fournier, a photographer with with the Contact Press Images agency, was in Colombia on Saturday, November 16, 1985, covering the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano, when he encountered Omayra Sánchez in the town of Armero. The girl had been trapped by debris from a massive mudslide. For two days and three nights, rescuers tried to release her, creating a media side-show in which Fournier had a front-row seat. Omayra finally succumbed to a heart attack.

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Fournier won the World Press Photo award in 1985 for his picture of Omayra, but he faced lingering moral doubts about his role in the drama. Is it enough for photographers to simply tell the story of people in distress? Was Omayra exploited as the media moved in to record her final hours? “Three times, I wanted to stop,” Fournier says. He did not, and the world could not stop looking at his work. Looking back, Fournier says photographers must simply testify to the dignity of his subjects.

“ THREE TIMES I WANTED TO STOP. ” P O R T F O L I O

“ HE KILLED HIMSELF AFTER HE WON THE PULITZER PRIZE. ”

THE GIRL AND THE VULTURE When he photographed this starving Sudanese girl in 1993, Kevin Carter faced a moral question similar to the one that Fournier faced in Colombia. A native of South Africa, Carter had risen to the top of his field documenting the battle against apartheid. Covering civil war and famine in Sudan, he found the starving girl near the village of Ayod, as she was dragging herself toward an aid station, a vulture behind her, seemingly waiting for her death. Carter got the shot, then chased the vulture away.

The photo was published in The New York Times on March 26 and instantly became a symbol of human misery. Thousands of readers wrote to ask about the fate of the girl. In an editorial, the newspaper explained that the photographer didn’t know if she had or had not survived. Carter, a sensitive man, immediately faced withering criticism, though his image brought him celebrity. He committed suicide in 1994, two months after receiving the Pulitzer Prize for his picture.

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© MARC GARANGER/COURTESY MUSÉE DE L’ELYSÉE

PORTRAIT OF CHERID BARKAOUN Can the act of photography be barbaric? If so, can the barbarism be redeemed by the sensitivity of the imagemaker? In 1960, Frenchman Marc Garanger, then 25, was sent to the town of Aïn Terzine in Algeria to carry out his military service. His job was to take pictures of some 2,000 Algerians for use on ID cards. For women like Cherid Barkaoun, the act of being photographed in public, being made to expose their naked faces, was a personal violation. The pain and the contempt Barkaoun felt is apparent in her portrait, and it could be found in many of the faces Garanger documented. The contempt was returned by the French military: “Come see, come see how ugly they are! Come see these macaques, these monkeys!” said Garanger’s captain when he viewed the images. Revolted, Garanger determined that his photographs could be used to expose the racism of the French military. In 1961 he clandestinely entered Switzerland and offered the photos to the newspaper L’Illustré Suisse. He later had them exhibited throughout France. In this context, images that were meant simply to catalog a people had the reverse effect of showcasing their humanity.

SHIELDS VERSUS GROSS

Few images better illustrate the shifting photographic ideas of taste and exploitation than Garry Gross’s 1975 nude portrait of Brooke Shields, then 10 years old. A New York-based advertising photographer, Gross was regularly employed by Shields’s mother to photograph her daughter, then a model with the Ford agency. He was also working on a personal project called “The Woman in the Child.” Shields posed both as a normal young girl and in the nude, heavily made up and oiled. Her mother signed a contract giving Gross full rights to the images, which were first published in a book called Little Women, then in a Playboy Press publication called Sugar and Spice. By 1981, Shields tried unsuccessfully to buy back the negatives. She then sued Gross, claiming that her mother had signed away her rights for onetime publication only. The court disagreed. Later, Shields sued again. The court ruled that “these photographs are not sexually suggestive, provocative, or pornographic.” Though Gross won the case, he was financially ruined by the legal battle, and his reputation was tarnished as social tastes changed and he was seen as an exploiter of children. Later, however, he sold the rights to the pictures to artist Richard Prince, who rephotographed and recontextualized the images. In 1999, his image of Shields, named “Spiritual America,” sold at Christie’s for $151,000.

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Photographers and news editors constantly grapple with notions of decency, and the events of September 11, 2001, presented journalists with plenty of tough judgment calls. Most media outlets made the decision not to show the dead, the major exception being the images of people falling from the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Those pictures in themselves raised important questions of journalistic ethics. While some viewers were offended, newspapers like The New York Times explained that it was important to report the reality of the event. Another newspaper, the New York Daily News, also published this image, made by photographer Todd Maisel shortly after the terrorist attacks. It was indeed a shocking reminder of the carnage, and for many—even other journalists—it exceeded the bounds of proper reporting. The difficulty, of course, is determining where those boundaries lie.

The images of Abu Ghraib prison that emerged in 2004 changed the history of photography, and American attitudes toward the war in Iraq. They also showed, perhaps more than any other pictures ever taken, the power that photography can wield. It was on April 28, 2004, that CBS aired six photos of Iraqi prisoners being tortured in Abu Ghraib prison by American soldiers. These explosive images were taken not by a professional journalist seeking a “scoop” but by the American soldiers themselves, using cell phone cameras. The New Yorker magazine then published nine more Abu Ghraib images accompanying an article by Seymour Hersh. In a month, close to 30 photographs were revealed to the public—a fraction of the images collected by the military, many of which have never been made public. The impact of the photographs was enormous. They discredited the American military and undercut the Bush administration’s assertion of moral authority in Iraq. In Arab countries, anger was immense. A number of the soldiers who were pictured torturing prisoners were eventually tried in military courts, but their superiors, who condoned the torture, were left unpunished. After losing several legal battles, the U.S. military seemed prepared in recent months to release more of the photos made at Abu Ghraib, which had been collected as part of the investigation of prisoner abuse. President Obama blocked the release because, he said, they might further incite anger among America’s enemies and endanger American soldiers serving in the Middle East.

THE HIDDEN 9/11

© TODD MAISEL/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

74

American Photo Mag.com

ABU GHRAIB

COURTESY MUSÉE DE L’ELYSÉE

75

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© ANDREAS GEFELLER/COURTESY HASTED HUNT GALLERY

MASTER CLASS

T

he bird’s-eye view has been a source of photographic fascination ever since Nadar shot Paris from a hot air balloon in 1858. To see earth from above, whether in flight or in photographs, is a transformative experience. While giving complex ground-level relationships

“Untitled (Office Floor) Dusseldorf, 2003”

a maplike simplicity, such views also reveal previously unseen relationships and afford information not visible from a sidelong perspective. All but the most elevated aerial images still retain a single perspective—the sense of a viewer’s position in space. Not

HIGH EYEPOINT

ANDREAS GEFELLER’S DIZZY, DUMBFOUNDING BIRD’S-EYE VIEWS American Photo Mag.com

77

“Untitled (Kunstakademie, room 220) Dusseldorf, 2009”

© ANDREAS GEFELLER/COURTESY HASTED HUNT GALLERY (3)

so with the “Supervisions” series of German photographer Andreas Gefeller. He has arrived at a remarkable, labor-intensive methodology that creates stunningly detailed images of large, flat surfaces indoors and out, from parking lots to office ceilings to fields of vegetables. These images seem to exist in a wholly abstract realm, with no apparent point of view, yet record their contents with a clarity that unaided human vision could never achieve. It is as if Gefeller had somehow scanned these enormous surfaces at ultrahigh resolution. Yet while the photographer acknowledges that the details of his images are faithful, he describes the final result as a “construction.” That construction results from Gefeller’s methodical process of shooting his subject—the paintsplattered floor of an art-school studio, the dense pattern of shoe imprints on a well-traveled

C LASS N “STITCHINOT E MANUALL G GIVES YO Y MORE CR U E CONTRO ATIVE L.”

beach—square by square. He mounts his Canon EOS 5D digital SLR on a tripod that has been extended but with the legs unsplayed so that he can wedge its feet into his belt; the tripod is aimed up at an angle, with the head tilted down to keep the camera parallel to the surface he’s photographing. After each cable-released shot, he takes a step (or three, or four) before shooting again. “When I started this series I actually measured the squares, but

LESSON 1 ON PRECISION “Sometimes I set up a grid to do the shooting, but often I don’t. The reason for this is interesting: Many of my subjects are urban places, which means they’re man-made. Humans put everything in strict order and in rows, which makes the photography process easier. I can use the grid created by tiles, paving slabs, or other regular patterns to orient myself, for example. This fact tells a lot about human character—about man’s will to control nature and his environment.”

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P H O T O G R A P H Y

“Untitled (Kunstakademie, room 209) Dusseldorf, 2009”

now it’s just a matter of feeling,” Gefeller explains. “I know the length of my feet and how many steps I have to make.”

G

efeller shoots with a 35mm lens, a moderatelywide focal length that captures a little over a square yard from about eye level. For outdoor subjects he often extends his improvised boom so that it’s as high as nine or ten feet. It can take many hours, if not days, to photograph the whole surface he has chosen, and Gefeller may shoot hundreds if not thousands of overlapping frames. For his recent image of an entire floor of the Art Academy in his native Dusseldorf (below), Gefeller made approximately 10,000 separate exposures.

Though the process of shooting is arduously systematic, the digital stitching—done without the help of dedicated stitching programs—is even more so. Sometimes Gefeller creates, or simply leaves intact, a seamless transition from frame to frame; other times he leaves unaltered a more abrupt transition. “I think this is one of the main creative aspects of the work, to decide where you leave some seams in the picture and where it’s unnecessary,” he says. “Naturally, it’s very easy to remove seams in Photoshop. But for me, these little ‘mistakes’ are very important for the viewer so that he can try to understand what he is looking at.” The result is reminiscent of the digital pastiche produced

LESSON 2 ON PRINT SCALE “There is no one ideal size for the ‘Supervisions’ prints. Some must have a minimum size or else you wouldn’t even understand what they are showing. I did an image of a golf driving range, and although this print is quite large, the golf balls on it are still tiny; if it were any smaller, the viewer wouldn’t be able to identify the golf balls. Other prints don’t need to be so large—images of paving slabs, for example. The sections remind me of pixels, an effect you’d lose if you made the prints really big. “Sometimes I downsample the individual frames before I put them together. But in general, I try to leave them at full resolution and downsample the whole image to suit the particular print size. That means of course that the files are massive. I could produce the prints in dimensions that would fill huge temples.”

“Untitled (Kunstakademie) Dusseldorf, 2009”

American Photo Mag.com

79

Below: “Untitled (Park) Dusseldorf, 2007”

by robotic space landing crafts such as the Mars rovers, and indeed, Gefeller often photographed the night sky with his grandfather’s camera when he was a child. And while Gefeller points out that for him the computer is not an instrument of manipulation, it is on the computer that the real artistic transformation occurs. “The more frames I put together, the greater the distance to a surface appears to be,” says Gefeller. “When

C LASS N “DECIDIN OT E G WH E R E T O SEAMS IS KEEP OF MY C PART R PROCESS EATIVE .” I’m working on images of the ground, I start flying! In the case of photographs that show ceil-

ings from below I find myself in a position that isn’t possible— one that seems to be dozens of meters under the earth.”

I

t would be easy to place Gefeller’s work in the mold of the Becher-inspired, descriptively neutral genre of current German photography. Gefeller applies that school’s rigor not to a literal record of his subjects but to what ultimately becomes, as a very large print on a gallery

wall, a highly abstract representation. And while abstraction is usually achieved with a reduction of detail, Gefeller’s “Supervisions” work is teeming with detail. In that respect, and in its challenge to photography’s one-eyed ethos, his work is subversive. “The main object of my work is not to manipulate the world,” Gefeller recently explained in a BBC broadcast. “It’s to change the way of looking at it.” —RUSSELL HART

© ANDREAS GEFELLER/COURTESY HASTED HUNT GALLERY

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P H O T O G R A P H Y

© JOE MCNALLY (4)

McNally shot this cowboy first by available light (1, below), then with flash mixed in (2), but ended up stopping down to cut back the available light (3) so that he could use flash alone to light his subject (here).

1

OUT OF THE DARK

2

WHY WOULD YOU MAKE AVAILABLE LIGHT UNAVAILABLE? TO LIGHT YOUR SUB J ECT J UST THE WAY YOU WANT. BY JOE MCNALLY 82

S K I L L S

3

W

hy would any sane photographer go from the the safe haven of existing light—light you can see, touch, and feel—into the mysterious, uncertain, and possibly dangerous land of flash? Think of it this way. That available light, as it’s commonly known, isn’t just available to you; it’s available to every other photographer. You can make a picture that will look kind

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of the same as the one the guy next to you is shooting. And if both of you submit your pictures to the same magazine, or agent, or stock house, or photo-sharing website, the reaction will be, “Hey, wait a minute, these pictures all look...the same.” It’s like Angelina Jolie and Reese Witherspoon showing up on Oscar night wearing the same dress. Quelle embarrassment! In a world of sameness, where there’s a Starbucks, a Gap, a Barnes & Noble, and a Pizza Hut on every other block of every other town you’ve ever been to, there is vibrance and joy in difference. In an era of royalty-free, rights-free, by-the-pound photography, it just might pay to step back and try to make your pictures the equivalent of a mom-and-pop shop or the place where the locals really eat. And one path to making your work different is to use light in creative and unexpected ways. Take this photograph of a well-appointed cowboy. I was on the road, in the middle of Noplace, Utah, and the sun had gone down. There was still plenty of light, but it was cool, subdued, and expressionless. It was available but unexciting. I put my actorcowboy Chris up against an old barn that had lots of cool stuff stuck on it, and I made a picture. A very average picture (1). It was a record of the scene, not an interpretation, shot at 1/80 second at f/2.8.

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ut what lingered in my head was the sun that had set over the distant hills on camera left. Its light was just getting interesting when it disappeared. (Available light will do that to you.) So I got out a flash, put a full-strength CTO warming filter on it, and placed it on a stand at about the angle where the sun had been. The filter turned the clean, neutral white light of the strobe, a Nikon SB-900 Speedlight, into the color of sunset. The SB-900 was advantageous here because of its ability to zoom its beam angle to match a 200mm focal length. When you zoom the flash head to 200mm but shoot with a shorter focal length (here, a 24-70mm f/2.8 Nikkor zoom set to 24mm), you concentrate the light. It gets punchy and direct, like late-afternoon light. I triggered the off-camera flash with another SB-900 that was hotshoed to the camera, using the same exposure (2). It warmed the scene just a touch. The camera was doing its job, mixing the flash and the available light

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American Photo Mag.com

© ANNE CAHILL

Lighting maven Joe McNally

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“I TOOK OVER THE CONTROLS, USING MANUAL SETTINGS THAT UNDEREXPOSED THE AVAILABLE LIGHT BY THREE STOPS.” in a reasonable way. But remember, it’s a machine. Like a food processor, it chops, slices, dices, and blends, all with the aim of uniformity. It plays it safe, in a word. Safe, as in…blah. A smooth, publishable exposure, but nothing with an edge or difference. So I took over the controls, putting the camera into manual mode and dialing in 1/125 second at f/5.6—settings that underexposed the scene’s available light by about three stops (3) without the flash firing. Ordinarily these results would make you check your settings. But here, in this dark place, is where I wanted to be. Now I had control. What happens when you open a camera shutter in a totally dark room? Nothing, until you add light. I had turned this roadside scene into a dark room by means of shutter speed and f-stop. The camera sees almost nothing now. It is waiting for input. It is waiting for light. So I made another exposure, this time with the flash firing and hitting the cowboy and the wall in a hard, intense way—creating lots of highlight and shadow areas. The result gives the formerly dull scene life, dimension, and color. Which proves you can do a lot with one flash and a light stand by the side of the road. You can make the sun come back.

85

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in the city of Tal Afar. Gunfire from American troops killed the mother and father and seriously wounded a son. A young girl emerged from the car covered in her parents’ blood. Hondros won the 2006 Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for the work.

WHILE SHOOTING THE STORIES OF THEIR LIVES IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN, THREE PHOTOGRAPHERS KNOW THEY CAN DEPEND ON EACH OTHER AND THE L ESSONS THEY L EARNED LONG AGO AT A SMALL NEWSPAPER IN OHIO. American Photo Mag.com

R 35

covered the (continued from page 42) wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on and off since 2001. Earlier this year he was traveling with a company of U.S. soldiers that was ambushed by the Taliban in a remote valley in Afghanistan. One of the soldiers was killed. Hicks’s images captured the desperate moments and the vulnerability of the baby-faced soldiers—you understand the reality of war in those faces. Next year’s Pulitzer Prize committee will surely be looking seriously at the pictures. Platt, who now shoots for Getty Images, covered the chaotic Israel-Lebanon conflict of 2006. There he snapped a picture of a sleek convertible filled with pretty, carefree Lebanese girls posing, cell phones in hand, in front of a devastated Beirut suburb. The photo won the World Press Photo of the Year award in 2006. He has also worked in Iraq, Liberia, Congo, and Indonesia. Hondros’s work in Iraq has also been honored. One of his most famous sets of images, made on January 18, 2005, documented the shooting of an Iraqi family whose car failed to stop at an American checkpoint

elatively speaking, the world of photojournalism is small, and to some extent it’s not so very interesting that three of the world’s finest photojournalists all emerged from the same small newspaper. (The world is even smaller than you might think: another prize-winning New York Times photographer, Lynsey Addario, also attended Staples High School with Platt and Hicks.) What is very interesting, I think, is the particularly American sense of destiny—or perhaps selfinvention is a better term—that underlies the story of Hondros, Hicks, and Platt. As a Frenchman in America, I was always fascinated by the fact that a guy from Missoula, Montana, could become filmmaker David Lynch, or that a geek working as a clerk at the video store down the street of my in-laws in Manhattan Beach, California, could become Quentin Tarantino. I’ve learned over the years that it’s the same with photography. Small-town America remains the place where great news photographers learn their craft while covering the staples of local news—fires, car accidents, high school sports, city council meetings, and Labor Day parades. Hondros, Hicks, and Platt all came to Troy because of work opportunity, because opportunity thrived in those midwestern towns. It’s a phenomenon that happens far less frequently in my native country. There, talented journalists or photographers rarely climb the ladder of success after starting at a local paper. In France, unfortunately, everything starts and ends in Paris. In America the ranks of photojournalism are

filled with people like Samantha Appleton, one of the founding photographers of the Noor agency; Todd Heisler, now a staff photographer with the New York Times; and Scott Strazzante, a photographer with the Chicago Tribune, all of whom started their careers at small newspapers in the Chicago suburbs. Spencer Platt believes that small newspapers became the generators of photojournalistic talent because of the vital and intimate connection they have traditionally maintained with local communities. “In the days before Google,” he theorizes, “newspapers were the bond of American communities. They provided information about high school sports, gave the latest news about a burglary, and provided an overview of world events. Every lunch counter, barbershop, and auto repair shop had a newspaper waiting to be devoured by someone with some time to kill. As these papers were usually thin on stories, photographs often got significant exposure. A photo, regardless of how good, was judged on the space given to it. At the Troy Daily News, a photographer shared the paper with only two other photo staff members. We awoke each morning excitedly going through the paper to see how big our images appeared. Front page, a photo spread, a bad crop, six columns, color, black and white. We were either mortified or euphoric.” Platt’s memories raise some inevitable questions: Where will future generations of photojournalists learn their craft? As he notes, the American small-town newspaper business is far different now, in the age of Google and Facebook, than it was then. Online communities have replaced real communities, and the role that newspapers once played—the way they brought everyone in town together on the same page, as it were—is less vital.

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hen I was working with Chris Hondros in Iraq, the soldiers we met knew the power of photography. They asked Chris to take pictures of them in action, and he obliged. At first we were embedded with Colonel Steve Miska’s unit in Baghdad during the winter of 2006, during the height of the civil war. After we left, Spencer came to cover the unit. Then in June of 2007, in Baghdad again, we met Captain George Feese and his men from

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the 82nd Airborne. Spencer was there, too, following the paratroopers throughout the summer. His e-mails helped me keep a sense of what was going on in the troubled neighborhood of Ghazaliyah after I had left. Tyler was in Afghanistan, and I met with him in Perpignan, France, in September 2007 at the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival, where he had an exhibition. That’s where I discovered his impressive set of combat pictures. Photojournalism is most certainly a small world: After all that time, so far from Troy, Ohio, these three photographers find their paths crossing again and again, and they have continued to support each other. I have yet to visit Troy. I now live in Paris, and chances are I may never see the town that launched the careers of Chris, Spencer, and Tyler. But I know this: It is a place, like every other place, where life is lived, where tragedies and triumphs follow one another. It is the perfect place to learn about the possibilities of photojournalism. When I asked Spencer about Troy, he e-mailed back this description of his life there: “I had never viewed a dead body before. I had just started working at the paper, and the morning ritual consisted of drinking coffee and listening to the police radio. With a crackle and a long series of beeps the radio came alive. A call came in about a car accident outside of town along some farm roads. We quickly consulted a map and made a dash for the car. It was summer, and the heat was shimmering along the black tarmac of the endless straight roads. Driving fast, we came up to a lone fire truck idling along the side of the road. In the middle of a freshly cut meadow was an old red American car, the kind that teenagers buy after years of mowing lawns. Next to the car was the body of a young man. No sheet had been placed on him and no one was attempting to resuscitate him. A woman arrived who I presumed to be his mother, and she became hysterical. We took some pictures and headed back to the paper in silence. In my years since leaving the Troy Daily News, I have worked at a series of newspapers and traveled the world covering wars and disasters. I have seen people shot and people dying and people dead. But the one person I will never forget is that young man spread out in the field under a beautiful blue sky. It was my first introduction to the news.” N

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CREATION AND CONSEQUENCE as artistic (continued from page 58) creations justifying protection by copyright. Recognition of their rights has developed gradually in Europe and the United States as a result of jurisprudence established after a wide-ranging debate on the status of the photographic image. This process was not easy

at a time when photography was still new— even as it became clear that the medium would drastically change artistic traditions and the consumption of imagery. With its unrivaled ability to reproduce reality and the production of multiple prints, photography raised a series of questions that were completely new.

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From the mid-1850s on, several major philosophical and cultural issues focusing on photography were dealt with in courts of law. Judges found it difficult to relate photography to a legal framework since two distinct areas were involved in the process—that of the law and that of ethics. Considering photography from the point of view of the law or of ethics illustrates its extraordinary ability to represent reality and to create meaning, or meanings. A photograph is interpreted according to the cultural conventions associated with its creation or distribution. Reading an image in this way is something each individual does in accordance with his personal moral or philosophical convictions. It is also what society as a whole does by referring to the laws and ethics that form the foundations of a particular culture. The conventions of representation change at the same time as the techniques used for the creation or the distribution of photographs. They also change by following the evolution of attitudes and ways of thought in a particular society. A review of the main cases that have seen photographers taken to court or that have led to the censuring of images and their prohibition reveals that the issues involved are associated with money, politics, morality (both lay and religious), sexuality, or the acknowledgement of the artistic status of the author.

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t the end of the 1960s, Guy Debord, the French thinker and founder of the Marxist Situationist International group, published The Society of the Spectacle. In this book, he develops a critical analysis of how social relationships are increasingly determined by the images that have become the main means through which individuals relate to the world. He also denounces the cult of commerce in consumer society. Bill Gates, the owner of Corbis, echoed this analysis when he stated, “Whoever controls images, controls minds.” The political power of images influences our understanding of reality, providing a single and often uncritical point of view on what occurs in the world. This phenomenon, which generates feelings of guilt and repression, contributes to an acculturation of our perception of reality. The danger involved is that of visual conformism and ready-made beliefs. Authority is also exercised through the control of reproduction rights. Nowadays, photographic collections and archives of 19th-

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PORT FOL IO S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R

Photographs have always had the power to cause trouble. More than books, more than painting, photographic images create a visceral response in viewers. Over the years, that has led to censorship by governments, legal battles in courts, and struggles to establish codes of proper behavior by imagemakers. A brilliant exhibition at the Musée de l’Elysée in Switzerland earlier this year, and a related new book available only in French, explore the various controversies associated with photographs, and, on the following pages, we present a glimpse at the issues the show raised. They are worth understanding because photography remains a powerful, and troublesome, medium.

2009

CONTROVERSIES IMAGES THAT HAVE DEFINED THE ET HICS OF PHOTOGRAPHY

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and 20th-century work have become financial and historical treasure troves involving original prints bought by museums and private collectors that are part of a thriving market. Inevitably, accusations of forgery have arisen. It also involves archives and documentary collections that are often in the hands of companies like Corbis and Getty, or of a variety of public and private museums and institu-

tions. These collections bring together millions of images that are controlled through the use of reproduction rights. For several years now, museums and institutions all over the world have tended to transform the photographs in their possession into commercial assets, thereby seriously affecting the laws and ethical principles that govern public policy. Most museums demand payment for access to images in their collections even when these pictures are not protected by copyright. This practice has become widespread institutional policy. It is true that museums face heavy financial burdens for the scanning and storage of their collections and that they suffer from the reduction of support from state and local authorities. However, the high prices involved have become an obstacle for scientific and cultural publications. They make research difficult and have a direct influence on the cost of both books and access to culture. Surprisingly, prices are often higher for a photograph that is not protected by copyright than for contemporary work.

Why are certain images appreciated, or even venerated, while others are censored? Why are some freely distributed in certain circumstances but prohibited in others? The photographs in this portfolio illustrate many of the ethical and legal questions peculiar to the medium. The exhibition and book they are drawn from are the result of many years of research, but neither is exclusively concerned with legal or ethical issues. Above all, the aim has been to show how a given society relates to images of itself at a particular historical moment. This is an attempt to grasp how these representations have been perceived and the interpretations they have been given. The examples that have been chosen give a clear understanding of the principles underlying photographic practice in a wide variety of fields, from the middle of the 19th-century to the present day. Daniel Girardin is a curator at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland.

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Keep abreast of the contemporary art photography scene during the New York Museum of Modern Art’s thoughtfully curated New Photography 2009. From September 16 to January 10, the exhibit will present recent significant work from six artists (including Leslie Hewitt and Daniel Gordon) with distinct aesthetic views on the state of photography and its technologies.

From October 10 to January 3, the Art Institute of Chicago will display Playing with Pictures, a collection of unusual photo collages crafted by Victorian aristocratic women. Combining watercolor paintings, photographic portraits, and fantastical imagery, the collages are an early example of the traditionally serious medium being repurposed for personal whims.

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National Character

Ending the International Center of Photography’s “Year of Fashion” is the exhibition Dress Codes, a global survey of photography exploring the conventions of style and personal presentation. From haute couture to everyday dress, the collection offers a comprehensive examination of our sartorial choices. Beginning September 18 until January 17.

During Chaotic Harmony: Contemporary Korean Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston presents photos from 40 artists that embody the evolving South Korean identity. The photographers (all of whom were born after the Korean War) aptly depict the complex social and cultural developments that have occurred in the past 45 years, while also offering a captivating look at the country’s future. Beginning October 18 to January 3.

Documenting History

Visitors to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. will receive a thorough education on photo history during In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes. From October 25 until March 14, the museum will exhibit an upclose look at (and explanation of) every major technology in image making, from photogravures to the recently extinct Polaroid.

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As Time Goes By

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The legends of the Wild West will come alive on September 25 (until January 24) during the Washington, D.C. National Portrait Gallery’s Frontier Encounters. Both photography and history buffs should take note, as the exhibition will display snapshots of the major historical figures (including Annie Oakley, Brigham Young, and Geronimo) that influenced the development of the western territories.

CARTER MULL/COURTESY MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Fresh Photography

From top: Sungsoo Koo’s “Tour Bus,” at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Carter Mull’s “Eleven,” at the MOMA; a photo collage at the Art Institute of Chicago; and John Wood’s portrait of Annie Oakley, at the National Portrait Gallery.

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Irving Penn’s “Steel Mill Firefighter, New York,” taken in 1951

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n September 9 (until January 10) the Los Angeles Getty Center will unveil for the first time its collection of more than 250 prints from Irving Penn’s series, Small Trades. The set of theatrical portraits of common tradesmen with their career

accoutrements was originally part of an assignment for Vogue in the 1950s. The Getty’s collection of photos (which were handpicked by Penn himself) treat even the most mundane jobs with honor and reverence. For more exhibitions, see page 93.

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